The Idol Episodes 1-2 Review: How To Make Sex Unsexy

Director: Sam Levinson

Creator: Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd), and Reza Fahim

Cast: Abel Tesfaye, Lily-Rose Depp,Suzanna Son, Troye Sivan, Jane Adams

The whole point of The Idol is, presumably, sex. Not just sex, but provocative, sexy sex. The kind that hacks at your moral demands from cinema, the kind that turns a character’s inner lives tumbling; the kind that is so full of heat, it scorches any self of self — self-respect, self-image. Sex is what inspires Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a pop icon a la Britney Spears, staging her return with an album. A lyric in her song goes like this: “I’m just a freak, yeah. You know I want it ba’aad”. 

After a photo of her with cum on her face goes viral, she revs along for a night out, where she meets a shady club owner, Tedros (Abel Tesfaye). He is — as we will find out — also a cult leader who is trying to twist Jocelyn’s life to his fiscal advantage. Hands full of rings, eyes usually shaded behind sunglasses, hair tied into a rat tail, he spots Jocelyn and begs to dance with her. Things naturally escalate. She has, in her words, “never fucked anyone with a rat tail before”. He can tell from her singing that she “doesn’t know how to fuck”. So he shows her how — by wrapping her face with her red, satin robe, choking her with the tie, and then, when she is ready to pass out, he rips a slit into the cloth over the mouth with a knife, letting her breathe again. The anatomical analogies are ripe, low hanging fruit. Jocelyn, heaving air, has now been struck by inspiration. She remixes her song with sounds of her sex-breathing. It feels “true” to her. Sex, allegedly, saves the day. 

The infamous Rolling Stone article on the drama behind this show’s doomed production comes to mind. The magazine interviewed people associated with The Idol, wondering how “the next Euphoria” became “torture porn”. The first draft of the show, helmed by Amy Seimetz, was discarded after much of it had been shot. The allegation was that Tesfaye, a co-creator, was worried about the much-ness of a “female perspective”. (That ‘problem’ has been dealt with comprehensively. The Idol is now a masterclass in the male gaze.) Sam Levinson, fresh from the success of Euphoria, was brought on board and what was supposed to be a “dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century” has now become the very thing it was satirising. The explicit scenes were “ramped up”, and the glamour multiplied by additions of Rachel Sennott, Dan Levy, Hank Azaria, Moses Sumney, and even K-pop superstar (or “Idol” as they call pop-stars in Korea) Jennie of Blackpink for a role that is raising eyebrows for its negative shades. A face-off between Jennie and Depp’s characters, bringing together the fandoms of K-pop and American pop — it sounds like an algorithmic, clickbait dream.    

If you dig around this show, you might find debris of its first draft — about fame, its toxicity; about the turmoil that pushes a celebrity to the brink of mental, emotional, and physical collapse. It is there in the repetitiveness of the dance rehearsal for one of Jocelyn’s music videos, the repetitiveness of the video being shot. Exhaustion is staged and expressed with such visual, visceral artistry and clarity. Each cinematic cut feels sharp. In the first episode, the chaos of managers, journalists, creative directors, executives, and intimacy coordinators swarming around Jocelyn has the energy of Levinson’s Euphoria. Those untethered, wide-eyed, anything-goes, slapstick, meandering, provocative exchanges that yield restlessness. This is the cacophony of fame, its exteriority. 

What about its interiority? Moulded from trauma, all that cinematic trauma — a dead mother, a career on the verge of being short-circuited, passing references to a cheating boyfriend — Jocelyn is a character far beyond irony, beyond sympathy, beyond disgust, beyond concern, beyond emotional release, catharsis, whatever. When she sees the photo of her with cum on her face, her face registers the turbulence through stillness. She asks, “This is everywhere?” and then, “I mean, I feel like it could be a lot worse.” Depp’s performance makes it impossible to distinguish her ambivalence from vacuousness. When Jocelyn speaks, you don’t know the register of it. Are you smirking with the show or at the show?

The central crack, however, is Tedros and Tesfaye’s performance of him. Tesfaye has none of that charisma that makes Jocelyn’s attraction to him seem plausible, electric. He speaks nonsense, and he speaks it slowly. He gives a “rapey” vibe, as Jocelyn’s assistant observes (while being ensnared by one of Tedros’s acolytes). And none of this evokes heat — the kind that makes you wonder if your head is perched on your shoulders anymore. You don’t see why Jocelyn is drawn to Tedros. You don’t even feel it. When she explains it, it doesn’t make sense. When you see them have sex, it makes even less sense. And when she plays the song they’ve made together, it’s so trite — like something a repressed adolescent came up with — it’s difficult to reconcile this music with Tesfaye’s other off-screen identity as singer-songwriter The Weeknd. 

Director Sam Levinson takes a hatchet to the adjective ‘sexy’ in The Idol, drowning it in exposed nipples and butt cracks, choking it till it loses its very meaning. The much-anticipated sex scenes are reduced to an exhaustive predictability pixelating into ennui. Yes, a blowjob sounds like Jocelyn’s saliva slapping sloppily against Tedros’s stretched skin, but neither the visuals nor the sounds make you desire the collapse of distance between the bodies. In the first two episodes of The Idol, sex is everywhere, and yet, eros is nowhere. Like that infamous episode in Euphoria, flooded with dicks, the anatomy, the variety, the shades, the shapes, Levinson’s new show feels like semantic saturation. Just like how, after a point, words begin to sound like random sounds put together, the human anatomy here begins to look clinical after two hours in this corner of Levinson’s mind. 

That is, perhaps, one of many seminal faults in The Idol, whose first two episodes premiered at Cannes Film Festival this year, and then released on streaming to a universal grr. (The show is available for Indian audiences on Jio Cinema, which speeds up the frame rate of the show leaving its runtime two minutes shorter — no censorship, though.) It makes sex, even kinky sex, look un-sex-like. This is counter to much of the online criticism, calling the show pornographic. This show isn’t pornographic. It would love to be called that, though, given its slimy, attention-seeking attitude. (HBO calls it the “sleaziest love story in all of Hollywood”) But no. You are not pornographic The Idol. Sit down. No detention for you.  

Shot on film — like Euphoria — by Marcell Rév and Arseni Khachaturan, the show is lit gorgeously. White hot sun sliding into a dark room through a crack in the drawn curtains; the light on Joceylin’s arm as she is fingering herself; Jocelyn and her crew in an open-roofed car speeding along roads at night, the string lights blurring into bokeh; the flashy elegance of the club. It is this eye for beauty that makes Levinson a sought after voice, his sexual fantasies wrapped and packaged in this carnal aesthetic. You almost want to reach out into the screen and touch the beauty of it, pass your hands over the grain. The rest, I’m afraid, leaves you hands-tied — not that way.